Bach's Adagio in D minor, BWV 974 — the melody is not Bach's; he arranged it. The original is the slow movement of an oboe concerto by the Italian composer Alessandro Marcello, which the young Bach transferred whole to the keyboard, adding a great deal of ornament the original never had. To complicate matters, for two centuries the piece was credited to Marcello's brother — both men were composers. Forty-one bars and three minutes, with the left hand doing nothing but keep time throughout. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
Two Marcellos, and two hundred years of the wrong one
In his twenties, working at Weimar, Bach made a batch of arrangements that moved other people's concertos onto the keyboard. Italian concerto scores were then arriving in Germany in quantity, and copying and recasting them was the most direct way to learn the Italian manner — more use than any treatise. This is one of them, catalogued as BWV 974.
The original is the slow movement of an oboe concerto by Alessandro Marcello. A Venetian, Marcello made his living in law and public office; composing was an amateur pursuit and he often published under a pen name.
Which is where the trouble starts. His brother Benedetto Marcello was also a composer, and better known; the concerto was long credited to the brother, and only in the twentieth century was it confirmed as Alessandro's. Modern editions mostly say "Bach, after A. Marcello," but plenty still carry the brother's name.
What did Bach add? The oboe line in the original is relatively plain, and in the keyboard version Bach fills it with ornament — the turns, passing notes and long trills are his. So the melody you hear has Marcello's skeleton and Bach's surface.
Spielberg put it into the story of his own family
In Spielberg's 2022 film The Fabelmans, the piece the mother plays at the piano is this Adagio.
The piano music was chosen by Spielberg himself and recorded by Joanne Pearce Martin of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The pieces are ones his own mother, Leah Adler, used to play — and the film is about his own family.
The left hand does one thing; the right finishes the sentence above it
From the first bar to the last, the left hand does one thing: chords, one to a beat, neither hurrying nor dragging. It does not sing. It is the floor.
On that floor the right hand sings a melody — and a heavily ornamented one. It rarely settles on a note, circling the target several times before landing, so it sounds like someone thinking aloud.
In the opening bars the right hand uses few notes, sketching the outline. After about forty seconds the ornament thickens, the same line filled with more turns.
Around two and a half minutes comes the fullest point: thirty-seven notes packed into one bar in the right hand, with almost no gaps. Then it lets go, and the last bar has only four notes, settling back onto the lowest D.
This one suits being left on: there is not a single sudden loud moment, and the sense of rise and fall comes from how dense the notes are rather than from force.
Forty-one bars, and the density climbs from six notes to thirty-seven
41 bars and 981 sounding notes (2 of them grace notes), in 3/4 and D minor, with no repeats.
The bar-by-bar counts lay the shape out clearly: 6 notes in bar 1, rising to 19 from bar 5, jumping to 32 at bar 13 and reaching 37 at bar 33 — an almost steadily rising curve until the last bar drops back to 4. The thickening ornament is this piece's crescendo.
The range is D2 to C6, 4 octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.085 seconds, in the densest right-hand figuration.
The page carries no dynamics, hairpins or pedal marks; Baroque keyboard music was written that way, because the harpsichord of the day did not vary its volume with the fingers and the texture itself carried the light and shade. Everything that rises and falls in this piece comes from how thickly the right hand is ornamented.
The difficulty is freedom in the right hand, not the fingers
First, the left hand must really be steady. It is the only time reference in the piece, and once it loosens the right hand's ornament has nothing to measure itself against. Practise it alone with a metronome until it needs no thought.
Second, do not make the right hand even. Play the ornaments mechanically to their written values and they turn into a scale exercise; those turns are inflection, and need weight and breath, with a slight wait just before the target note.
Third, the tempo. This performance takes 40 to the quarter, which is very slow — and slowness is what gives the right hand room to inflect. Faster, the whole piece becomes a run of notes getting to the end.
Fourth, the pedal. Nothing is written, which means it is your call; follow the left-hand chords, changing every beat or every two, and do not hold it down.
We rate this 3 out of 5.
Other keyboard pieces by the same arranger
Bach's Prelude in C major, BWV 846, the Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114, the Invention No. 1, BWV 772, and the Prelude in C minor, BWV 999, are all on this channel.
If you like this texture — left hand keeping time while the right sings long lines — the slow movement of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata does the same thing a century later, and is here too.
